First, the one-line answer, because you may be in a hurry: if you only need to read it, ask whoever sent it for a PDF, or open it in the free LibreOffice Draw. If you need the words and pictures back out and there is nobody with Publisher left to ask, you need a tool that reads the file directly.

Now the detail, because which route is right depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

Before you start: what do you actually need?

Be honest with yourself about which of these you are:

  • "I just need to see what is in it." A view or a PDF is enough. Easiest case by far.
  • "I need to print it, looking right." You need faithful rendering, so PDF from Publisher itself is the gold standard.
  • "I need to reuse the text and the photos." You need extraction, not viewing. Different problem, different tools.
  • "I need to edit the layout and make next month's edition." You need to rebuild it in something modern. Publisher's page model has no direct equivalent in Word, Canva or Affinity Publisher, so a converter cannot hand you a fully editable, pixel-accurate version of the same document in one of them. Budget for rebuilding your live templates rather than converting them.

1. Ask for a PDF (free, and by far the best result)

If a human being sent you the file, this is the answer. In Publisher it is File → Save As → PDF and it takes about fifteen seconds. The output is exactly what the document is supposed to look like, because the program that made the file is the one rendering it. Nothing on this page beats it for fidelity.

The same applies inside an organisation. If one machine in the building still has Publisher, that machine is the most valuable asset you have for this job — use it before it is replaced.

2. LibreOffice Draw (free, cross-platform, results vary)

LibreOffice is free and open source, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Draw component has included a Microsoft Publisher import filter since version 4.0.

To use it: install LibreOffice, then open Draw and use File → Open, pointing at your .pub. (Opening it from your file manager may launch the wrong LibreOffice component; going through Draw directly is more reliable.)

How well it does depends on the document. A single-page flyer with standard fonts often comes through well enough to read and print. A twelve-page newsletter with master pages, custom fonts, layered images and tight text wrapping is where the differences show — the common ones people report are substituted fonts, text frames that have shifted, and master-page furniture that has not carried across. That is not a fault so much as the nature of reimplementing an undocumented format; it is genuinely impressive that it works as often as it does.

Try it on one representative file first. If your documents come through acceptably, you have a complete free answer and you can stop reading. That is a real possibility and we would rather you found out now.

Note also that a file opened in Draw can only be saved back out in LibreOffice's own drawing formats, or exported to PDF or images. It does not become a Publisher file again.

3. Scribus and other desktop publishing apps (free or paid)

Scribus is a free, open-source desktop publishing program and is a sensible destination if you are rebuilding your workflow rather than reading one file. It does not import .pub directly, so it belongs in the "where do I go next" conversation rather than the "how do I open this" one. The same is true of the paid layout applications: they are excellent tools for making the next newsletter, and none of them opens a .pub.

4. Online converters (free or cheap, with a real trade-off)

There are plenty of web services that will take a .pub upload and hand you back a PDF. They work, they need nothing installed, and for a poster advertising a jumble sale they are a completely reasonable choice.

The trade-off is not a technicality: your file leaves your computer. It is transmitted to a server you do not control, processed there, and retained under a policy you have probably not read. Deletion timescales vary from minutes to indefinitely, and the terms of some services grant broad permission to process uploaded content.

Where that matters. Publisher was the workhorse for exactly the documents you should not upload casually: parish rotas with home addresses and phone numbers, school newsletters naming pupils, membership and gift-aid lists, safeguarding leaflets with named contacts, staff directories, and unpublished pricing or tender material. If your .pub contains any of that, choose a route that runs on your own machine — free or paid, we do not mind which.

5. The tip that does not work: renaming .pub to .zip

You will find this suggested in a lot of places, and it is worth being clear that it is wrong for this format.

It comes from a true fact about modern Office files: a .docx, .xlsx or .pptx really is a ZIP archive, so renaming one to .zip and opening it does let you rummage around inside and pull out the images.

A .pub is not built that way. From Publisher 2.0 onwards it uses the Microsoft Compound File Binary Format — also called OLE2 or a compound document — which is an older container entirely. You can confirm it yourself: every such file starts with the eight bytes D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1, whereas a ZIP starts with PK. Point a ZIP tool at it and it will tell you the archive is invalid, which is the correct answer.

The container being OLE2 is public and documented. What is not documented is the part that matters: how Publisher lays out pages, objects, coordinates and the relationships between them inside those streams is proprietary and was never published. That is why reading a .pub properly takes real work rather than a rename.

6. A local recovery tool that reads the file directly (what we make)

This is the route for the case the other five do not cover: you have the files, you have no Publisher, nobody you can ask has Publisher, and you need the content out — not just a picture of it. After October 2026 that becomes an ordinary situation rather than an unlucky one.

Publisher Rescue is a desktop application that parses the .pub structure itself, with no copy of Publisher involved, entirely on your own computer. From your own files it recovers:

  • Every text story in the document, exported as a Word .docx, plus RTF and optionally plain text;
  • The images, as standard files — PNG, JPEG and TIFF written out as stored, Windows bitmaps rebuilt into openable BMPs, and WMF and EMF metafiles decompressed and exported rather than merely counted;
  • A PDF carrying the recovered content, ending in a notes page that lists everything the tool could not rebuild;
  • The page size read from the file, and the number of pages it actually rebuilt — that figure is the number of layout pages in the PDF you receive, not a claim about how many pages the original had;
  • The Publisher format family the file was saved in — Publisher 2000, or Publisher 2002–2019, which share one version marker — rather than the exact release;
  • A plain-language report, and a JSON version of it, stating exactly what was and was not found.

What it does not do, stated plainly. It recovers content, not page design. The .docx is text-faithful — your words come through reliably — but it is not a replica of the original page, and the words arrive as a plain flow: across the six genuine Publisher files this build has been run against, no character or paragraph format table could be decoded, so sizes, bold, italic and colour are not carried over and no font name was reported. The PDF is not a reproduction of your design either — fonts, sizes, bold/italic and colours are not reproduced, and WordArt, master-page artwork, colour schemes, shape fills and table cell layout are not rebuilt; the PDF states that on every page and lists what it left out on its own notes page. Coverage is Publisher 2000–2019, and the tool names the format family a file was saved in rather than the exact release — Publisher 2002 through 2019 all write the same version marker. The Publisher 2000 path is in the build but no genuine Publisher 2000 file has been through it, and its older page-layout directory is not read; Publisher 97/98 and earlier are a different format and are reported as out of scope rather than mis-converted. It does no password cracking and no protection bypass — it is for files you own.

Your original is only ever read, never written to: the report records a SHA-256 checksum of the source taken before the scan and again afterwards, both printed in full so you can compare them yourself.

Supported operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and macOS 10.15 or later on Intel and Apple silicon Macs. One purchase covers both — you get each download.

It is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Saving the recovered files is what the £79 licence unlocks.

So which one should you use?

  • One file, just need to read it: ask for a PDF, or try LibreOffice Draw.
  • One file, contains nothing sensitive, no software wanted: an online converter is fine.
  • Lots of files and you still have Publisher: use Microsoft's free PowerShell script — see our bulk conversion guide.
  • You need the text and images back as reusable material: see extracting text and images from a .pub.
  • No Publisher anywhere, sensitive content, or a whole archive to save: a local tool that reads the format directly.

Whichever you choose, work from copies and leave your originals alone. A .pub you still have is a problem you can solve later; one you have overwritten is not.